This exponential improvement has dramatically enhanced the effect of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy.[9] Moore's law describes a driving force of technological and social change, productivity, and economic growth in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.[10][11][12][13]

The period is often quoted as 18 months because of Intel executive David House, who predicted that chip performance would double every 18 months (being a combination of the effect of more transistors and their being faster).[14]

Although this trend has continued for more than half a century, "Moore's law" should be considered an observation or conjecture and not a physical or natural law. Sources in 2005 expected it to continue until at least 2015 or 2020.[note 1][16] However, doubts about the ability of the rule to remain valid into the indefinite future have been expressed. For example, the 2010 update to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors predicted that growth would slow at the end of 2013,[17] with a projection of a slowing of the doubling period for transistor counts and densities to every three years.

For the thirty-fifth anniversary issue of Electronics Magazine, which was published on April 19, 1965, Gordon E. Moore, who was working as the director of research and development (R&D) at Fairchild Semiconductor at the time, was asked to predict what was going to happen in the semiconductor components industry over the next ten years. His response was a brief article entitled, "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits".[18] Within his editorial, he speculated that by 1975 it would be possible to contain as many as 65,000 components on a single quarter-inch semiconductor.

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years.
[emphasis added]

G. Moore, 1965

His reasoning was a log-linear relationship between device complexity (higher circuit density at reduced cost) and time:[19][20]

In 1975 Moore slowed his forecast regarding the rate of density-doubling, stating circuit density-doubling would occur every 24 months. During the 1975 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting he outlined his analysis of the contributing factors to this exponential behavior:[19][20]

Die sizes were increasing at an exponential rate and as defective densities decreased, chip manufacturers could work with larger areas without losing reduction yields

Despite a popular misconception, Moore is adamant that he did not predict a doubling "every 18 months." Rather, David House, an Intel colleague, had factored in the increasing performance of transistors to conclude that integrated circuits would double in performance every 18 months.

In April 2005, Intel offered US$10,000 to purchase a copy of the original Electronics Magazine issue in which Moore's article appeared.[24] An engineer living in the United Kingdom was the first to find a copy and offer it to Intel.[25]

As the cost of computer power to the consumer falls, the cost for producers to fulfill Moore's law follows an opposite trend: R&D, manufacturing, and test costs have increased steadily with each new generation of chips. Rising manufacturing costs are an important consideration for the sustaining of Moore's law.[27] This had led to the formulation of Moore's second law, also called Rock's law, which is that the capital cost of a semiconductor fab also increases exponentially over time.[28][29]

Numerous innovations by a large number of scientists and engineers have helped significantly to sustain Moore's law since the beginning of the integrated circuit (IC) era. Whereas assembling a detailed list of such significant contributions would be as desirable as it would be difficult, just a few innovations are listed below as examples of breakthroughs that have played a critical role in the advancement of integrated circuit technology by more than seven orders of magnitude in less than five decades:

The invention of the complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) process by Frank Wanlass in 1963 [32] and a number of advances in CMOS technology by many workers in the semiconductor field since the work of Wanlass have enabled the extremely dense and high-performance ICs that the industry makes today.

The invention of the dynamic random access memory (DRAM) technology by Robert Dennard at I.B.M. in 1967 [33] made it possible to fabricate single-transistor memory cells, and the invention of flash memory by Fujio Masuoka at Toshiba in the 1980s,[34][35][36] leading to low-cost, high-capacity memory in diverse electronic products.

The invention of chemically-amplified photoresist by C. Grant Willson, Hiroshi Ito and J.M.J. Fréchet at IBM c.1980,[37][38][39] that was 10-100 times more sensitive to ultraviolet light.[40] IBM introduced chemically amplified photoresist for DRAM production in the mid-1980s.[41][42]

The interconnect innovations of the late 1990s include that IBM developed CMP or chemical mechanical planarization c.1980, based on the centuries-old polishing process for making telescope lenses.[51] CMP smooths the chip surface. Intel used chemical-mechanical polishing to enable additional layers of metal wires in 1990; higher transistor density (tighter spacing) via trench isolation, local polysilicon (wires connecting nearby transistors), and improved wafer yield (all in 1995).[52][53] Higher yield, the fraction of working chips on a wafer, reduces manufacturing cost. IBM with assistance from Motorola used CMP for lower electrical resistance copper interconnect instead of aluminum in 1997.[54]

Computer industry technology road maps predict (as of 2001[update]) that Moore's law will continue for several generations of semiconductor chips. Depending on the doubling time used in the calculations, this could mean up to a hundredfold increase in transistor count per chip within a decade. The semiconductor industry technology roadmap uses a three-year doubling time for microprocessors, leading to a tenfold increase in the next decade.[55] Intel was reported in 2005 as stating that the downsizing of silicon chips with good economics can continue during the next decade,[note 1] and in 2008 as predicting the trend through 2029.[56]

Some of the new directions in research that may allow Moore's law to continue are:

In April 2008, researchers at HP Labs announced the creation of a working memristor, a fourth basic passive circuit element whose existence only had been theorized previously. The memristor's unique properties permit the creation of smaller and better-performing electronic devices.[59]

In February 2010, Researchers at the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland announced a breakthrough in transistors with the design and fabrication of the world's first junctionless transistor. The research led by Professor Jean-Pierre Colinge was published in Nature Nanotechnology and describes a control gate around a silicon nanowire that can tighten around the wire to the point of closing down the passage of electrons without the use of junctions or doping. The researchers claim that the new junctionless transistors may be produced at 10-nanometer scale using existing fabrication techniques.[60]

In April 2011, a research team at the University of Pittsburgh announced the development of a single-electron transistor, 1.5 nanometers in diameter, made out of oxide based materials. According to the researchers, three "wires" converge on a central "island" that can house one or two electrons. Electrons tunnel from one wire to another through the island. Conditions on the third wire result in distinct conductive properties including the ability of the transistor to act as a solid state memory.[61]

In February 2012, a research team at the University of New South Wales announced the development of the first working transistor consisting of a single atom placed precisely in a silicon crystal (not just picked from a large sample of random transistors).[62] Moore's law predicted this milestone to be reached in the lab by 2020.

In April 2014, bioengineers at Stanford University developed a new circuit board modeled on the human brain. 16 custom-designed "Neurocore" chips simulate 1 million neurons and billions of synaptic connections. This Neurogrid is claimed to be 9,000 times faster as well as more energy efficient than a typical PC. The cost of the prototype was $40,000. With current technology, however, a similar Neurogrid could be made for $400.[63]

The advancement of nanotechnology could spur the creation of microscopic computers and restore Moore's Law to its original rate of growth.[64][65][66]

The trend of scaling for NAND flash memory allows doubling of components manufactured in the same wafer area in less than 18 months

Atomistic simulation result for formation of inversion channel (electron density) and attainment of threshold voltage (IV) in a nanowire MOSFET. Note that the threshold voltage for this device lies around 0.45 V. Nanowire MOSFETs lie toward the end of the ITRS road map for scaling devices below 10 nm gate lengths.[55]

On 13 April 2005, Gordon Moore stated in an interview that the projection cannot be sustained indefinitely: "It can't continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens". He also noted that transistors eventually would reach the limits of miniaturization at atomic levels:

In terms of size [of transistors] you can see that we're approaching the size of atoms which is a fundamental barrier, but it'll be two or three generations before we get that far—but that's as far out as we've ever been able to see. We have another 10 to 20 years before we reach a fundamental limit. By then they'll be able to make bigger chips and have transistor budgets in the billions.

In January 1995, the DigitalAlpha 21164 microprocessor had 9.3 million transistors. This 64-bit processor was a technological spearhead at the time, even if the circuit's market share remained average. Six years later, a state of the art microprocessor contained more than 40 million transistors. It is theorised that, with further miniaturisation, by 2015 these processors should contain more than 15 billion transistors, and by 2020 will be in molecular scale production, where each molecule can be individually positioned.[68]

In 2003, Intel predicted the end would come between 2013 and 2018 with 16 nanometer manufacturing processes and 5 nanometer gates, due to quantum tunnelling, although others suggested chips could just get larger, or become layered.[69] In 2008 it was noted that for the last 30 years, it has been predicted that Moore's law would last at least another decade.[56]

Some see the limits of the law as being in the distant future. Lawrence Krauss and Glenn D. Starkman announced an ultimate limit of approximately 600 years in their paper,[70] based on rigorous estimation of total information-processing capacity of any system in the Universe, which is limited by the Bekenstein bound. On the other hand, based on first principles, there are predictions that Moore's law will collapse in the next few decades [20–40 years]".[71][72]

One also could limit the theoretical performance of a rather practical "ultimate laptop" with a mass of one kilogram and a volume of one litre. This is done by considering the speed of light, the quantum scale, the gravitational constant, and the Boltzmann constant, giving a performance of 5.4258 ⋅ 1050 logical operations per second on approximately 1031 bits.[73]

Then again, the law often has met obstacles that first appeared insurmountable, but were indeed surmounted before long. In that sense, Moore says he now sees his law as more beautiful than he had realized: "Moore's law is a violation of Murphy's law. Everything gets better and better."[74]

Technological change is a combination of more and of better technology. A 2011 study in the journal Science showed that the peak of the rate of change of the world's capacity to compute information was in the year 1998, when the world's technological capacity to compute information on general-purpose computers grew at 88% per year.[75] Since then, technological change clearly has slowed. In recent times, every new year allowed humans to carry out roughly 60% of the computations that possibly could have been executed by all existing general-purpose computers before that year.[75] This still is exponential, but shows the varying nature of technological change.[76]

The primary driving force of economic growth is the growth of productivity,[12] and Moore's law factors into productivity. Moore (1995) expected that “the rate of technological progress is going to be controlled from financial realities.”[77] The reverse could and did occur around the late-1990s, however, with economists reporting that "Productivity growth is the key economic indicator of innovation."[13] An acceleration in the rate of semiconductor progress contributed to a surge in U.S. productivity growth,[78][79][80] which reached 3.4% per year in 1997-2004, outpacing the 1.6% per year during both 1972-1996 and 2005-2013.[81] As economist Richard G. Anderson notes, “Numerous studies have traced the cause of the productivity acceleration to technological innovations in the production of semiconductors that sharply reduced the prices of such components and of the products that contain them (as well as expanding the capabilities of such products).”[82]

While physical limits to transistor scaling such as source-to-drain leakage, limited gate metals, and limited options for channel material have been reached, new avenues for continued scaling are open. The most promising of these approaches rely on using the spin state of electron spintronics, tunnel junctions, and advanced confinement of channel materials via nano-wire geometry. A comprehensive list of available device choices shows that a wide range of device options is open for continuing Moore's law into the next few decades.[83] Spin-based logic and memory options are being developed actively in industrial labs,[84] as well as academic labs.[85]

Another source of improved performance is in microarchitecture techniques exploiting the growth of available transistor count. Out-of-order execution and on-chip caching and prefetching reduce the memory latency bottleneck at the expense of using more transistors and increasing the processor complexity. These increases are described empirically by Pollack's Rule, which states that performance increases due to microarchitecture techniques are square root of the number of transistors or the area of a processor.

For years, processor makers delivered increases in clock rates and instruction-level parallelism, so that single-threaded code executed faster on newer processors with no modification.[86] Now, to manage CPU power dissipation, processor makers favor multi-core chip designs, and software has to be written in a multi-threaded manner to take full advantage of the hardware. Many multi-threaded development paradigms introduce overhead, and will not see a linear increase in speed vs number of processors. This is particularly true while accessing shared or dependent resources, due to lock contention. This effect becomes more noticeable as the number of processors increases. There are cases where a roughly 45% increase in processor transistors has translated to roughly 10–20% increase in processing power.[87]

On the other hand, processor manufacturers are taking advantage of the 'extra space' that the transistor shrinkage provides to add specialized processing units to deal with features such as graphics, video, and cryptography. For one example, Intel's Parallel JavaScript extension not only adds support for multiple cores, but also for the other non-general processing features of their chips, as part of the migration in client side scripting toward HTML5.[88]

A negative implication of Moore's law is obsolescence, that is, as technologies continue to rapidly "improve", these improvements may be significant enough to render predecessor technologies obsolete rapidly. In situations in which security and survivability of hardware or data are paramount, or in which resources are limited, rapid obsolescence may pose obstacles to smooth or continued operations.[89] Because of the toxic materials used in the production of modern computers, obsolescence if not properly managed, may lead to harmful environmental impacts.[90]

Moore's law has affected the performance of other technologies significantly: Michael S. Malone wrote of a Moore's War following the apparent success of shock and awe in the early days of the Iraq War. Progress in the development of guided weapons depends on electronic technology.[91] Improvements in circuit density and low-power operation associated with Moore's law, also have contributed to the development of Star Trek-like technologies including mobile telephones[92] and replicator-like 3-D printing.[93]

Several measures of digital technology are improving at exponential rates related to Moore's law, including the size, cost, density, and speed of components. Moore wrote only about the density of components, "a component being a transistor, resistor, diode or capacitor,"[77] at minimum cost.

Transistors per integrated circuit - The most popular formulation is of the doubling of the number of transistors on integrated circuits every two years. At the end of the 1970s, Moore's law became known as the limit for the number of transistors on the most complex chips. The graph at the top shows this trend holds true today.

Density at minimum cost per transistor - This is the formulation given in Moore's 1965 paper.[1] It is not just about the density of transistors that can be achieved, but about the density of transistors at which the cost per transistor is the lowest.[94] As more transistors are put on a chip, the cost to make each transistor decreases, but the chance that the chip will not work due to a defect increases. In 1965, Moore examined the density of transistors at which cost is minimized, and observed that, as transistors were made smaller through advances in photolithography, this number would increase at "a rate of roughly a factor of two per year".[1]

Dennard scaling - This suggests that power requirements are proportional to area (both voltage and current being proportional to length) for transistors. Combined with Moore's law, performance per watt would grow at roughly the same rate as transistor density, doubling every 1–2 years. According to Dennard scaling transistor dimensions are scaled by 30% (0.7x) every technology generation, thus reducing their area by 50%. This reduces the delay by 30% (0.7x) and therefore increases operating frequency by about 40% (1.4x). Finally, to keep electric field constant, voltage is reduced by 30%, reducing energy by 65% and power (at 1.4x frequency) by 50%.[note 2] Therefore, in every technology generation transistor density doubles, circuit becomes 40% faster, while power consumption (with twice the number of transistors) stays the same.[95]

The exponential processor transistor growth predicted by Moore does not always translate into exponentially greater practical CPU performance. Since around 2005–2007, Dennard scaling appears to have broken down, so even though Moore's law continued for several years after that, it has not yielded dividends in improved performance.[96][97][98] The primary reason cited for the breakdown is that at small sizes, current leakage poses greater challenges, and also causes the chip to heat up, which creates a threat of thermal runaway and therefore, further increases energy costs.[96][97][98] The breakdown of Dennard scaling prompted a switch among some chip manufacturers to a greater focus on multicore processors, but the gains offered by switching to more cores are lower than the gains that would be achieved had Dennard scaling continued.[99][100] In another departure from Dennard scaling, Intel microprocessors adopted a non-planar tri-gate FinFET at 22 nm in 2012 that is faster and consumes less power than a conventional planar transistor.[101]

Quality adjusted price of IT equipment - The price of Information Technology (IT), computers and peripheral equipment, adjusted for quality and inflation, declined 16% per year on average over the five decades from 1959 to 2009. [102][103] The pace accelerated, however, to 23% per year in 1995-1999 triggered by faster IT innovation,[13] and later, slowed to 2% per year in 2010–2013.[102][104]

The rate of quality-adjusted microprocessor price improvement likewise varies, and is not linear on a log scale. Microprocessor price improvement accelerated during the late 1990s, reaching 60% per year (halving every nine months) versus the typical 30% improvement rate (halving every two years) during the years earlier and later.[105][106] Laptop microprocessors in particular improved 25–35% per year in 2004–2010, and slowed to 15–25% per year in 2010–2013.[107]

The number of transistors per chip cannot explain quality-adjusted microprocessor prices fully.[105][108][109] Moore's 1995 paper does not limit Moore's law to strict linearity or to transistor count, “The definition of 'Moore's Law' has come to refer to almost anything related to the semiconductor industry that when plotted on semi-log paper approximates a straight line. I hesitate to review its origins and by doing so restrict its definition.”[77]

Network capacity - According to Gerry/Gerald Butters,[119][120] the former head of Lucent's Optical Networking Group at Bell Labs, there is another version, called Butters' Law of Photonics,[121] a formulation that deliberately parallels Moore's law. Butter's law says that the amount of data coming out of an optical fiber is doubling every nine months.[122] Thus, the cost of transmitting a bit over an optical network decreases by half every nine months. The availability of wavelength-division multiplexing (sometimes called WDM) increased the capacity that could be placed on a single fiber by as much as a factor of 100. Optical networking and dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) is rapidly bringing down the cost of networking, and further progress seems assured. As a result, the wholesale price of data traffic collapsed in the dot-com bubble. Nielsen's Law says that the bandwidth available to users increases by 50% annually.[123]

Pixels per dollar - Similarly, Barry Hendy of Kodak Australia has plotted pixels per dollar as a basic measure of value for a digital camera, demonstrating the historical linearity (on a log scale) of this market and the opportunity to predict the future trend of digital camera price, LCD and LED screens, and resolution.[124][125][126]

The great Moore's law compensator (TGMLC) , also known as Wirth's law - generally is referred to as bloat and is the principle that successive generations of computer software increase in size and complexity, thereby offsetting the performance gains predicted by Moore's law. In a 2008 article in InfoWorld, Randall C. Kennedy,[127] formerly of Intel, introduces this term using successive versions of Microsoft Office between the year 2000 and 2007 as his premise. Despite the gains in computational performance during this time period according to Moore's law, Office 2007 performed the same task at half the speed on a prototypical year 2007 computer as compared to Office 2000 on a year 2000 computer.

Library expansion - was calculated in 1945 by Fremont Rider to double in capacity every 16 years, if sufficient space were made available.[128] He advocated replacing bulky, decaying printed works with miniaturized microform analog photographs, which could be duplicated on-demand for library patrons or other institutions. He did not foresee the digital technology that would follow decades later to replace analog microform with digital imaging, storage, and transmission mediums. Automated, potentially lossless digital technologies allowed vast increases in the rapidity of information growth in an era that now sometimes is called an Information Age.

The Carlson Curve - is a term coined by The Economist [129] to describe the biotechnological equivalent of Moore's law, and is named after author Rob Carlson.[130] Carlson accurately predicted that the doubling time of DNA sequencing technologies (measured by cost and performance) would be at least as fast as Moore's law.[131] Carlson Curves illustrate the rapid (in some cases hyperexponential) decreases in cost, and increases in performance, of a variety of technologies, including DNA sequencing, DNA synthesis, and a range of physical and computational tools used in protein expression and in determining protein structures.

^"Over 6 Decades of Continued Transistor Shrinkage, Innovation" (Press release). Santa Clara, California: Intel Corporation. Intel Corporation. 2011-05-01. Retrieved 2015-03-15. 1965: Moore’s Law is born when Gordon Moore predicts that the number of transistors on a chip will double roughly every year (a decade later, revised to every 2 years)

^"Moore's Law to roll on for another decade". Retrieved 2011-11-27. Moore also affirmed he never said transistor count would double every 18 months, as is commonly said. Initially, he said transistors on a chip would double every year. He then recalibrated it to every two years in 1975. David House, an Intel executive at the time, noted that the changes would cause computer performance to double every 18 months.

^Mellor, Chris (2014-11-10). "Kryder's law craps out: Race to UBER-CHEAP STORAGE is OVER". theregister.co.uk (UK: The Register). Retrieved 2014-11-12. Currently 2.5-inch drives are at 500GB/platter with some at 600GB or even 667GB/platter – a long way from 20TB/platter. To reach 20TB by 2020, the 500GB/platter drives will have to increase areal density 44 times in six years. It isn't going to happen. ... Rosenthal writes: "The technical difficulties of migrating from PMR to HAMR, meant that already in 2010 the Kryder rate had slowed significantly and was not expected to return to its trend in the near future. The floods reinforced this."